The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has employed the prestigious National Academy of Sciences to whitewash the EPA’s illegal experiments on human beings. Naturally, the sordid activity is all being conducted in secret.
Several years ago, we detailed for American Thinker readers how we had discovered that the EPA was violating virtually every law enacted and regulation promulgated for the protection of human experiments since the development of the Nuremberg Code.
The story begins in the 1990s, when the EPA began regulating fine particulate matter (P.M.) in outdoor air. These regulations were justified on the basis that they would prevent 15,000 premature deaths per year. The supposedly scientific studies underlying the rules could not be challenged at the time because the EPA refused to provide Congress and independent researchers with the key underlying data. Also, the relevant laws and their judicial interpretation did not provide a way to challenge EPA science in court.
Though the EPA got away with issuing the rules, it knew they were vulnerable to challenge because the underlying studies – all dubious statistical correlation studies – didn’t actually show that P.M. killed anyone. Neither did animal toxicology studies, no matter how much P.M. the laboratory animals inhaled. So the EPA decided to back up its statistical claims by testing extremely high doses of P.M. on real, live people.
Over the next 15 years, the EPA began quietly experimenting on elderly subjects (up to age 80), asthmatics, people with heart disease or metabolic syndrome, and combinations of the aforesaid by placing them in a sealed chamber and making them inhale high levels of P.M. as well as diesel exhaust, smog, and even chlorine gas. At one point, the EPA even experimented with children by spraying high levels of diesel exhaust particulate up their noses.
Though none of these experiments produced any biological response indicating that P.M. is in any way harmful, the EPA relied on its statistical studies to make even more grandiose claims about the supposed dangers of P.M. The EPA claimed that any inhalation of P.M. could cause death. It claimed that death could occur within hours of inhalation or after decades of inhalation. In 2011, EPA administrator Lisa Jackson testified to Congress than P.M. caused about 570,000 deaths per year in the U.S., more than 20 percent of all U.S. deaths.
The EPA continued its experiments.
We found out about the experiments in September 2011, when the EPA finally published a report about an alleged health effect caused by P.M. Agency researchers exposed an obese 58-year-old woman with heart disease to a high level of P.M. The experiment was stopped when the woman’s heart began to beat irregularly. She was taken to the hospital, where she remained overnight. The EPA’s report chalked up the event to the exposure to P.M.
